A Theophany Miracle in Our Family

Photo: multiurok.ru Photo: multiurok.ru   

This happened in January 2011. My Moscow aunt was returning home from church after the evening service for the Eve of Theophany with full bottles of Theophany water. She was in an uplifted, festive spirit. It was a wonderful snowy evening. She then slipped and fell on the ice, and broke her arm.

The fracture turned out to be complex, with a slipped bone. She managed to drag herself home from the hospital and called her husband. My uncle was visiting their daughter in Germany. Without delay he returned his ticket for the end of January and flew to Moscow on the next flight. While my aunt was waiting for him, she was committing the sin of murmuring: the pain was wearing her out, all the worse for her absolutely helpless state. She was unable to dress or undress herself, couldn’t take a shower or even fix a meal. And she was tormented by perplexity: Why did it happen? On such a great feast! After all, she wasn’t coming home from a night out, she was returning from church, pure as the driven snow! She had received Communion the day before. Hadn’t argued with anyone. She’d lived a whole two months in reclusion. And Batiushka sprinkled her with holy water after the moleben!

Something akin to resentment was clawing at her soul.

As she sat with her husband at tea, they went over what she might have done wrong. They bounced around from hospital to hospital—right up to January 24. That was the day that my uncle was supposed to have flown home according to the original ticket, and she was supposed to have met him at Domodedovo Airport. What was their amazement when they saw the news on television about the terrorist act in Domodedovo Airport! There was an explosion in the arrivals waiting area. Many people died that day.

That is precisely where my aunt would have been at the moment of the explosion, waiting for the very flight that would have delivered my uncle, arriving from Dusseldorf. He would have been descending the steps from the airplane.

If she hadn’t broken her arm…

Not a miracle, you say? It certainly was a miracle. An ordinary Theophany miracle.

After that, my dear relatives had a moleben of thanksgiving served and celebrated my aunt’s second birthday.

And for me, this was an important lesson. It’s so much easier to live when you know that no matter what happens, even the worst things, it’s only because the Lord saved you from something worse.

Natalia Kornilieva
Translation by OrthoChristian.com

Pravoslavie.ru

1/24/2025

Comments
Editor1/24/2025 5:24 pm
Anna: That is a common Russian saying, when a person for all intents and purposes should probably have died in some accident or other, but he or she miraculously escapes death. They call it "another birthday".
Anna1/24/2025 11:53 am
Please tell me what is meant by second birthday?
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